TORONTO -- A playoff atmosphere comes with different realities than an average game. The crowd is louder, the lights are brighter, and as the Blue Jays learned on Tuesday, there’s no margin for error.

Sometimes, you can even make the right pitch and just get beat by the hottest hitter in the building. Trevor Richards threw Giancarlo Stanton a 2-2 changeup that was below the zone and inside, but the Yankees slugger went down and got it anyways, sending a three-run moonshot to left field in the seventh inning to help hand the Blue Jays a 7-2 loss at Rogers Centre.

The Blue Jays got surprise help from the Orioles, who beat the Red Sox, keeping them just one game back of Boston for the second American League Wild Card spot, while the Yankees opened up a more comfortable lead holding the top spot. A win could have pulled Toronto even with the Sox, though, and with the Blue Jays now a half-game behind the Mariners, this race continues to barrel toward a weekend of chaos.

New York sends AL Cy Young Award candidate Gerrit Cole to the mound for the second game of the series on Wednesday to face José Berríos, and with Boston starting Nathan Eovaldi against Baltimore, Toronto will need to make something happen. We can’t officially call these “must-win games,” mathematically, but they’re getting awfully close. The Blue Jays feel like they’ve played a few of those already.

“We [already] have been, so it’s the same thing tomorrow,” said manager Charlie Montoyo. “Just forget about tonight and be ready to play tomorrow. We’ve done it before, so why not do it again?”

The Blue Jays played the Yankees close through the first six innings, with the urgency of each play lending to the playoff feel, but it was always the Yanks applying the pressure. Stanton’s blast was the lowest pitch he’s ever homered on, just 1.26 feet off the ground, but the game had built up to that moment and Stanton is on a special kind of tear, having homered in five of his last six games.

“I don’t know how you can hit a ball like that,” Montoyo said. “You’ve got to give Stanton credit for that, because I just saw the replay and that ball was in the dirt. He went out and hit it out. Richards has been good, so you’ve got to give Stanton credit.”

Toronto had its chance to pull even in the inning prior, but Bo Bichette tried to advance from second to third on a ball that got away from Gary Sánchez, and he was thrown out. The high sinker got away from Clay Holmes and bounced off Sánchez’s glove into foul territory up the third-base line, so it’s understandable that Bichette wanted to seize the moment and put himself a fly ball away from scoring with one out and Teoscar Hernández at the plate. It backfired, though, and those precious inches kept the Yankees in the driver’s seat.

These are the plays that are quickly forgotten on a Tuesday night in mid-May, but with the stakes higher than they’ve been in five years for the Blue Jays, they stand out. It wasn’t all bad, either, as there were encouraging signs of what an aggressive Toronto team would look like.

Both Bichette and George Springer stole a base in the first inning, with Springer eventually scoring the first run of the game. Later, with Hyun Jin Ryu done after allowing three runs on six hits over just 4 1/3 innings in his first start back off the injured list, former No. 1 prospect Nate Pearson took the mound and pitched a scoreless inning, ending the frame with a strikeout on a 100.3 mph fastball. The Blue Jays have needed a reliever to emerge for early leverage situations, and with Pearson’s raw talent, he’s the perfect candidate.

Ryu’s outing wasn’t perfect, but like Montoyo is fond of saying, it gave the Blue Jays a chance to win. If Ryu makes another appearance on the final day of the regular season, it will almost certainly be a true must-win game.

“We’ve got to come back and try to win our next game,” Ryu said. “All of these games are going to be very important. I’m just going to get ready and prepare for my last game of the season, and I hope that our players in there compete and do our best to the very end.”

The clock is ticking, and at this point in September, those ticks come a little faster. This is an early taste of what the playoffs would feel like for the Blue Jays, and the margins only get tighter from here.